The 'Pipelineistan' conspiracy: The war in Syria has never been about gas

Six years into a conflict that has killed at least 400,000 people, there is a widely held belief that the bloodshed in Syria is simply another war over Middle Eastern energy resources.
The
bloodshed, so the theory goes, is a proxy battle about two proposed
pipelines which would run across the country and on to Turkey and
Europe.
While neither pipeline has left the drawing board, or indeed was ever realistic, this has not dampened the theory's popularity as a core reason for the Syria conflict.
The first pipeline is allegedly backed by the US and runs from Qatar
through Saudi Arabia and Jordan to Syria. The second is a supposedly
Russia-backed pipeline that goes from Iran, via Iraq, to Syria.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, it is claimed,
rejected the Qatari pipeline in 2009, at the request of Moscow, to
ensure that European reliance on Russian gas would not be undermined.
As
a result, some commentators claim, the US and its European and Gulf
allies, including Qatar, decided to orchestrate a rebellion against
Assad to ensure that their pipe dreams became a reality rather than the
Iranian option. Russia, in turn, backed Syria to ensure its own energy
interests prevailed. Iran is also an ally of the current regime in
Damascus.
These claims have been promoted in several quarters: the Qatari-based Al Jazeera first floated the concept of a "Pipelineistan war" in 2012.
Even US establishment journal Foreign Affairs and the Guardian newspaper picked up on the theory, which gained further traction in 2016 in an article by Robert Kennedy Jr, and was flagged by, among others, JillStein of the Green Party, a former US presidential candidate.
The idea was floated again after the US bombing of Syria in April. This, it was claimed, was further "proof" of Washington's desire to oust Assad and enable Europe to diversify its gas dependency away from Russia.
While the US has been covertly
working with Gulf allies against the Assad regime, controlling Syria's
energy resources and pipeline networks was not a primary concern. If so,
it would be a very low priority for regime change.
Why? Firstly,
the timeline is wrong. Covert action against Syria started under the
George W Bush administration, in 2005, well before the alleged Qatari
offer to Damascus in 2009.
"We can see US action against the Syrian regime well before the notion of this pipeline came into existence," says Justin Dargin, an energy scholar at Oxford University.
Secondly, the pipeline hypotheses do not stand up to the realities of
how energy is transported through the Middle East and the obstacles
faced by pipeline proposals, many of which fail to come to fruition.
Even the Arab Gas Pipeline, whose second phase came online in 2005, has
been mired in problems.Robin Yassin-Kassab, author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, says the Pipelineistan theory also ignores how the conflict started and the early months of the revolution.
"Like all conspiracy theories, it thrives on the absence of content and in-depth knowledge of the country," he says.

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Profile

Paul Cochrane is the Media Director and Co-Founder of Triangle Consultants (triangleconsultants.net) in Beirut, where he has lived since 2002. He has written for over 80 publications worldwide, covering business, media, politics and culture in the Middle East, East Africa and the Indian subcontinent. He is also a media commentator, and has appeared on CBS-NYC radio, Canada's CTV and CBC Radio, Press TV, Etejah TV, Future TV, Al Manar, Sahar TV, Today FM Ireland, and South Korea's TBS eFHM radio.